Income Protection For Renderers

The reason this trade is not simply external plastering is the angle the arms spend the day at.

The shoulder is least stable and most easily damaged when working above shoulder height, and rendering an elevation means doing exactly that for most of a shift, holding a loaded hawk or trowel. The damage accumulates as impingement, then rotator cuff wear, then tears.

That has a practical consequence for cover specifically. Shoulders are the single likeliest cause of a claim in this trade, so if offered terms exclude a shoulder with existing history, the policy has had its most relevant risk removed. That is still worth having for everything else, but it is worth understanding clearly rather than accepting without reading, and we would go through it with you.

Rendering cannot be done in frost, heavy rain or strong sun on a fast-setting mix, which shapes the year before anybody is ill.

A renderer's annual income is therefore built from the days the weather allowed, and the good months carry the bad ones. That matters when deciding how much to insure: a figure based on a strong summer will not be supported at claim stage, because benefit is normally measured against actual earnings.

So use a defensible annual figure from accounts, and factor in that a period of illness in the working season costs more than the same period in January. That is an argument for a shorter deferred period, not a longer one.

Self-employed renderers have no death in service, which is the normal position rather than the exception here.

There is rarely a business to fall back on either. A rendering business is a mixer, a van, a scaffold relationship and the person who can finish a wall flat and clean.

The calculation is therefore the plain one: the mortgage, van and plant finance, and the years of income a household would need, with nothing to offset it.

The ending is shoulders that will not go above the horizontal, in somebody still in their forties or fifties.

That person can work. They cannot render, and the gap between those two facts is exactly where income protection stops helping once suitable alternative work is available.

A lump sum funds a move that would otherwise be unaffordable: estimating, supervision, contract management for render and external wall insulation systems, or technical and specification work for a manufacturer. All of them value the knowledge and none need the shoulders.

Rendering gangs of three or four are common, with the owner on the trowel alongside everybody else.

During an absence the gang can keep working, which helps, but the pricing, the setting out and the relationships with builders are usually the owner's alone. Scaffold hire continues whether or not anybody is on it, which is a real and often large cost.

Cover can be sized to include continuing costs as well as personal income, and where there is a limited company, executive income protection and relevant life cover can both be company-paid rather than funded from taxed income.